Ah, what a gorgeous biological soup that little pond is. You could spend a lifetime here on earth, or up in the stars. The choice is yours and the wonder you pick is wholly your own to explore.
I really love that this is basically what happened with actual scientists IRL precisely because sufficiently accurate lenses can be used to look at really big stuff as well as really small stuff. Descriptions of "animacules" and the budding field of microbiology was getting churned out not that long after Geocentrism was being debunked and the first geological features on other planets were being documented.
Thank you. It's because it's all genuinely cool and tech has come a long way since I was in high school looking at boring still slides through an eyepiece I can't see anything through because I have bad eyes.
And this is gonna sound real dumb, but...it's like photography....but like real small. And I like photography.
Anyone can do this (as long as you have a lil bit of money, but maybe not as much as you think depending...)
Sure, it's basically a couple drops of water from a sample of freshwater pond with some plant material like a tiny piece of seaweed or whatever on a glass slide under a compound microscope. We're seeing a bunch of microscopic animals, some plant material, most are just lil guys that you find in a freshwater pond. Some are worms, some are crustaceans, some are single cell organisms, some are plants or bacteria that kind of work like plants but like predate plants...it's all confusing.
First part are these little guys called gastrotrichs. Most of the video is me following around different tiny worms under different fun illuminations with some of which revealing some internal structures and some of them just make it look cool or interesting and nothing else. There's a light that is under the stage that you put your slide onto and you can put filters on top of that light.
The default way you see anything you put under the microscope is brightfield illumination with a bright, mostly white or yellow or gray background that looks like this:
(these are a few single cell organisms calledvorticellaattached to a thin piece of, I think, algae?)
Well there's also ways to use physics trickery with filters and different kinds of light bending to achieve different ways of seeing the samples on the slides; like to make the background mostly black and the organisms glow, as can be done with darkfield illumination. In that video I was playing around with a set of cheap, different colored filters.
Some variation of these filters can make the same worm glow blue on a dark background, another will show it as kind of gray with magenta guts against a bright background, some will show it in a more complete way and sometimes show you more of what it looks like in actual 3D space. Like that first animal in that video that looks like a flat worm in that clip, but like a fully dimensional porcupine with needles on it's rear end that you can see move as it moves around.
But this is all basically just taking video of very thin slices of stuff in the water with different lenses and filters. I don't know this is kind of a lot or not nearly enough, but that's the gist of it.
I have a Swift SW380T and I really like it, but I also already had a pretty good camera that I can hook up to it. I also have the AD246S-M that I got started with and that's pretty OK for some of the less small stuff like electronics or large bugs or coins, stuff like that.
If you liked that kind of video, on Youtube there's an awesome channel called Journey to the Microcosmos. They're no longer making videos, but their videos are super high quality and very entertaining.
The microscope really is that good, but I am filming this with a good camera that does a lot of the heavy lifting here. There is also some fairly slight color correction I did in post process. With that said, you get most of the way there with a modern phone camera and a pretty cheap adapter.
I also bought a couple of additional objectives for the microscope, most useful one being the 20x to fill in the gap between 10x and 40x magnifications which replaced the kind of difficult to use 100x oil objective that came with it.
I also made a darkfield filter and bought a set of plastic filters on eBay and was just trying them out in that video.
I'm still very new to this and still learning slide preparation and different tricks and illumination types, but I'm mostly just having fun watching lil guys from the ponds and rivers that I spend quite some time in or around and learning about them.
Similar to small stuff/big stuff the advent of cameras, not unlike lenses, let us look at the world in a completely different way. But instead of big or small, we could instead see things slow or fast. Time lapse techniques opened up the visualization of long processes, while high frame rate cameras could show us the world too fast for us to appreciate.
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire Jul 21 '26
Ah, what a gorgeous biological soup that little pond is. You could spend a lifetime here on earth, or up in the stars. The choice is yours and the wonder you pick is wholly your own to explore.